December 2002
Research and Teaching

An evening of dating

Academics at the University recently celebrated the 21st century science that underpins our understanding of the age of the universe in a talk entitled 'Creation: 23rd October, 4004BC?'.

Around 1675 Archbishop Ussher calculated that the Universe started at 9am on Monday, October 23rd, 4004BC. To coincide with the 6006th anniversary of Archbishop Ussher's calculations, an evening of discussion involving academics from Bradford was held at the University.

Dr John Baruch, who organised the event, said: "Today science has separated itself from that belief and we now know that the universe was born around 15 gigayears (15,000 million years) ago. However, the evening was a fascinating celebration of modern science on the 6006th anniversary of the date of creation that Archbishop Ussher derived from the bible. As a leading scholar of the day he would have enjoyed the evening, which included wide-ranging insights into a number of issues on time."

Academics who gave presentations included:

Professor Peter Graves-Morris, who demonstrated how he used to calculate astronomical redshifts in the sixties when the age of the universe was a controversial topic;

Simon Blockley, who showed how the layers of the Greenland icecap enable researchers to follow the earth over 150,000 years, and how radioactive dating of meteorites give an upper age of the earth of 4.5 gigayears;

Nigel Lindsey, who was able to illustrate the evolutionary development of life from the genome;

Valentina Zharkova, who showed how local lad Fred Hoyle first calculated the age of the sun to be about 5 billion years and how its vast energy output could be sustained for another five billion years.

3 December 2002

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